


and then, on tiptoe, the wolf—

by stellerssong



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: (please note sarcasm in previous tag), Alternate Universe - Creatures & Monsters, Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Body Horror, M/M, Our Werewolves Are Different, The Ongoing Quest To Make Alexander Hamilton Just Really Really Ridiculously Good-Looking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-18
Updated: 2018-09-27
Packaged: 2019-06-12 07:39:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15335061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stellerssong/pseuds/stellerssong
Summary: "& you’ll think—oh, so this is what death is like."Alexander learns an abject lesson about seeking prompt medical attention for animal bites and related injuries. John tries to help. Things go rather sideways.





	1. Chapter 1

Google search: _got bitten by a weird looking dog_

Google search: _how to tell if dog has rabies_

Google search: _cost of rabies vaccine_

…Erk. Shit. Alex navigates to the back button, wincing as his forearm scrapes against the edge of his laptop keyboard. It’s sore, even through the layers of gauze and bandages he’d clumsily thrown on, although that could be due to the fact that he’d also poured something like half a bottle of rubbing alcohol over it. Old-fashioned home remedy, he remembers his mom doing that for Jamie when Jamie’d come home from soccer with an ugly half-scabbed scrape on his leg. And Jamie had never gotten gangrene and had to have his leg sawed off, so there you go.

All right, so there’s probably no real medical efficacy to it, but unless Alex magically comes into a couple thousand dollars sometime in the next 24 hours, it’s about what he can do. Unless—he pecks _is rabies vaccine covered by insurance_ into Google, a dubious cant to his mouth, skims the results, backtabs quickly. Yeah, okay. So, barring any miraculous windfalls, he’d better run out to CVS tomorrow morning for another bottle of rubbing alcohol. Maybe two.

John would chip in if Alex asked, Alex is pretty sure, but Alex is also pretty sure that he’d rather die of rabies than put John out of his way like that. Thanks, but no thanks, he’d prefer not to have that very blatant reminder of wealth disparity hanging over their relationship. Besides which, asking John for help with this would entail telling him how it is that he came to require rabies shots in the first place, and he can imagine the chewing-out he’d get for that, or at best the teasing. _Thought you didn’t even like dogs, Alex! What happened, your nesting instincts kick in?_

In all honesty, Alex can’t even say why he did it. Post-interview jitters, maybe. He hasn’t gotten to where he is by not taking every shot that presents itself, so he’d had to at least try for a position with the on-campus Law Review, even though he’s only a first year. Ballsy move, though. Enough to send him off after what he thinks was a pretty decent showing in a cold sweat, shivering despite the cocky grin on his face.

So, okay, maybe he was a little susceptible to like…making weird impulsive decisions, walking out of that interview. But that still doesn’t explain the particular tenor of his bad choice. The imaginary John in his head is right; Alex doesn’t particularly like dogs. They’re noisy and smelly and loud, and they make messes, and they need an amount of attention that has always struck Alex as a little pathetic, as mean as he knows that is to say. He never had one growing up, and he doesn’t want one now, and the fact that their apartment complex has a blanket ban on pets has never, ever caused him to lose a minute of sleep.

And even so, when he’d seen the huge, shaggy-furred dog skulking around the vacant lot near the bus stop, it had given him pause. He should’ve just walked the rest of the way home, but he’d rolled up his sleeves against the lingering early-autumn heat and approached the animal instead, one hand extended, making stupid little kissy come-here noises through his lips. Vague idea in his mind of bringing it to John, getting it taken to the shelter, patching up whatever was making it walk with such a halting gait. Fixing things. Helping, somehow, because of course the poor lost (giant, crazy-eyed) puppy couldn’t help itself.

Instead it had bitten him hard, right on his stupid outstretched arm, and run off. Which means that instead of getting to surprise John with his dog-whispering skills, he’s here skimming the PetMD page on rabies and trying to convince himself that this list of symptoms is totally unrelated to anything he’s seen in the past 24 hours. Lucky him.

He worries his lower lip, frowning at the neat bulleted list. Pica, fever, change in tone of bark, hydrophobia—can’t confirm any of those, obviously. Paralysis and lack of coordination could maybe explain the weird way the thing had walked, although it’d moved pretty damn well when it bit him, and it’d run off with no apparent problem. Weird behavioral shit, again, no way to confirm or deny. It hadn’t been drooling or foaming at the mouth, though, Alex is sure of that. Even he’s not reckless enough to walk right up to a caricature-perfect depiction of a mad dog. And, and…

…Well, he might be talking out his ass here, he’s not the one enrolled in a pre-vet graduate program. But the dog hadn’t _seemed_ rabid to Alex. Something in its expression, he thinks. Aren’t rabid animals supposed to be glazed-eyed, zombified monsters? This dog had seemed, for lack of a better word, _intelligent_. A flicker of wariness in its eyes as Alex had approached. Like a wild animal’s, sure, it was a stray, after all, but some sense of recognition that maybe the creature approaching it didn’t mean it any harm.

And then it had bitten him anyway, so.

Alex groans, swipes his hand over his eyes, squeaks as he jars his arm. Only one way to figure out whether his hypothesis is based in reality or not, he supposes. To Google Image Search.

Several hours and a highly disturbing Youtube spiral later, the sun’s sunk below the horizon, and Alex isn’t any closer to an answer, although he is fairly sure it’s going to be a long, long time before he can look any of John’s shelter dogs in the eye again. He snaps his laptop shut and has just shoved it away across the couch when—speak of the devil—he hears footsteps in the hall outside, a key turning in the front door lock. He jumps up and hurries to the door just in time to throw himself into John’s arms.

“Boy, someone’s excited to see me. Hello to you too.”

Alex plants a sound kiss on John’s lips. Pulls back, wrinkling his nose. “You smell like dog. Like a whole pack of dogs.”

“Yeah, well, that’ll be the shelter. I’ve told you about the shelter, yes? The shelter I’ve been volunteering at for a year and a half. You know, that one.”

“I _know_ where you—no, come on, I wasn’t trying to be mean, I just noticed, you know? You’re still sexy to me. Even if they’re forcing you to roll around on the floor with the dogs for your entire shift. Which might be a violation of your rights as a volunteer, now that I think of it…”

“Ha ha, Alex.” John shrugs off his bag and jacket, kicks off his shoes. “I promise no one’s rights are being violated.”

“Well, if they are, you just let me know, all right? I’ll take the case pro bono. Anything for my deeeeeeear Laurens.”

“Dork.”

“I’m serious!”

“And I’m…seriously tired. I’m sorry I’m back so late, by the way, we got a litter of puppies in, really tiny ones, and no one seemed to know if they’d had their shots or how old they were or…ugh. It was a mess. Had to stick around and deal with that.” John drops onto the couch, pulling his phone out and flipping through it. “I just got McDonalds on the way home. I hope you weren’t waiting for me to eat dinner.”

“Nah, I ate on campus, after my—”

“—After your interview, yeah! Shit, I completely forgot that was today. How’d it go?”

“Uh—good, I think. Fine. It was…yeah. We’ll see.” Alex finds himself having to reach really hard for that answer. Honestly, he’d all but forgotten his interview nerves in the scramble over the, well, _the other thing_. Which he is still not telling John about.

“Is…is that bad?”

“No! No, I do think they liked me—I mean, it’s hard to tell, _lawyers_ , right? But I kept up with ‘em fine, and I think I sort of pissed one of the junior editors off, but that’s okay, if you’re not pissing someone off then you’re probably not letting people know who you are, and at that point why even bother trying for the position, right, like, I _want_ to be seen…”

“Right,” John says a little distantly. Alex trails off. John is looking at him—staring, really—with distant confusion in his eyes, like he doesn’t quite recognize Alex’s face.

“What? What is it? Something in my teeth?” Alex mimes scrubbing at his mouth.

John just keeps staring, though. After a moment, he finally comes out with, “…Did you not shave today?”

“Huh? Y—of course I did, I had an interview, Jonathan—”

“Not my name, but okay—”

“—what’m I gonna do, show up looking like Chewbacca in a thrifted blazer?”

John snorts. “Yeah, you wish. You and I both know it takes you weeks to grow anything like a respectable goatee.”

“Well, clearly what _you_ know is _incorrect_ ,” Alex says huffily, scrubbing at the stubble on his cheeks. Huh, they do feel a little scruffy. Maybe he’s remembering wrong, and he didn’t shave before he left for the interview? That’d be a bit embarrassing. Although, he swears—he remembers nicking his jaw and dabbing at the cut with toilet paper, hoping he hadn’t gotten blood on his shirt—unless that was yesterday, or two days ago? He can feel his brows starting to knit with a puzzled expression to mirror John’s, so he hurriedly rearranges his features into an attitude of haughtily wounded pride. “A-anyway. I can _so_ grow a beard. A better one than you can, too.”

“Yeah,” John says, still frowning at Alex. His gaze prickles under Alex’s skin. “My mistake.”

“…So cut it out with the staring, already?”

“S-sorry. Um.” John scratches at his head, ducks his chin. That crawling feeling dissipates. “Are you, are those new contacts?”

“You’re not making any sense. Yes, they’re new contacts, in that I switch them out every morning…”

“Okay, okay, Christ. I just—something about you looks different. This better not be one of these tests where you get mad at me if I can’t figure out the tiny obscure thing you’ve changed in your personal style.”

“You really think I’d do something like that? I’m offended.” Alex saunters over to the couch, tired of the conversation and the faint, indefinable weirdness, flops himself over John’s lap. John rolls his eyes hugely, even as he twines his fingers through Alex’s hair.

“Wounded, even?”

“ _Hurt_ , John.”

“Oh, well, we can’t have that. C’mere, you big drama queen. I’ll kiss it better.”

“Mm—‘sides, I wouldn’t pull a trick like that on you. You’d catch me right away.”

“I caught you just now, didn’t I? You didn’t even know you were doing it. I’m miles ahead of you, babe.”

“Mighty hunter, king of the jungle,” Alex purrs, and then with one thing and another runs out of words for a while. Only a little while, though, because it’s a school night for both of them, and Alex is still loath to let John undress him and see his bandaged arm. John scoffs a little at Alex’s coy act, but accepts the rain check in a gentlemanly fashion before following Alex to get ready for bed.

And, hey, just because sex is off the table doesn’t mean a bit of cuddling and maybe some lowkey dry humping is as well, right? It’s not like that’ll blow his cover, Alex tells himself, going through the motions of brushing teeth and throwing clothes into the hamper. As long as he keeps his sweatshirt on. No big deal.

He smiles at John, who’s already sprawled out on the bed, pulls the blinds closed to block out the milky light of the not-quite-full moon. Stupid thing always seems to shine right onto his half of the bed. Like he didn’t have enough trouble falling asleep in the first place. John smiles back at him, soft and a little bemused, reaches out to catch him around the waist and pull him down onto the bed when he draws near enough.

“You’ve got beautiful eyes,” John murmurs, pushing a lock of hair out of Alex’s face. “Did you know there’s gold in them?”

“Huh. Never heard that one before. And you’ve got a beautiful _face_. So there.”

“You’ve got a beautiful—uh—soul?”

“Ooh, metaphysical one-upmanship. Very hard to top.”

“All right, all right, all right, we’re both sassmasters, agreed,” John grumbles, shoving at him. “Can I just compliment your eyes? I never noticed that about them before. It’s hot. You’re hot.”

“Well, thank you, John Laurens. How sweet of you to say.” He gives John a tender little kiss on the lips, rolls over to feel John’s arms around him, John’s comforting solid warmth at his back. “Go to sleep now.”

“I will if you do.”

“You know that’s always a process. You’re putting too much pressure on me. But I shall try, just for you.”

“Sassmaster. Love you.”

“Love you too. Mmph.”

“Hmm?”

“Nothing, just—laid weird on my shoulder, that’s all.” Alex wriggles around a little bit. “I’m good. G’night.”

“Night.”

John hooks a leg over Alex’s, pulls him closer, and in minutes he’s dead to the world. A little disappointing—Alex had kind of been looking forward to getting more handsy—but whatever. Another night, maybe. And it’s so damn cute the way John just conks out like that. Alex squirms around some more, trying to get comfortable, but gives up when he can’t seem to find a position that favors both his injured arm and what seems to be a tweak in his back. Gonna be one of _those_ nights. Great.

Well, it’s not like he’s never dealt with this before. He sighs, nudges his pillow into a more suitable shape, closes his eyes, lets his mind drift a little. Laughs silently at what floats through—stupid, but hopefully it’ll at least put him in a sleeping mindset.

_Goodnight room. Goodnight moon. Goodnight cow jumping over the moon…_

 

***

 

Alex blinks himself awake in the dark. “Ow,” he says, vaguely, and then, “ _ow_ ,” because _fuck_ , all of a sudden he hurts _everywhere_. A faint ache in his arm, true, but that’s far from the end of it—his back feels like he’s been sleeping on a sack of rocks, his hips creak unpleasantly as he adjusts position, hell, even his jaw feels sore. Maybe John socked him in the face in his sleep, he thinks, trying for humor, and then wheezes; it seems the pain won’t stand to be belittled, as it’s just sent a dull red jab shooting up his spine to jangle just between his shoulder blades.

Advil. He needs Advil, immediately. With a groan, he sits up, pushes himself to his feet, winces at the arthritic _click-POP_ his left shoulder makes as he stretches. God, is he getting old, or what? John makes a sleepy mumble, rolling over to flop his arm onto the spot Alex has just vacated.

“B’right back.”

“Mmgghh.”

That’s his John, always the sweet-talker. Alex glances at his phone screen for the time. _1:23 AM_. Something seems off about that—it’s not dark enough to be that early, surely, he can see John’s slack face desaturated but clear in the gloom—but he can’t put his finger on the particular nature of the wrongness, not through the fog of sleepiness and the random stabs of pain. He’ll worry about it later, he decides, once he’s popped a good fistful of over-the-counter painkillers.

Down the hall he shuffles, heading for the bathroom. He’s not entirely sure this episode isn’t just a really, really boring lucid dream; he knows who he is, and where he is, and all the little things that slip in dreamspace, but everything feels _more_ than just a normal walk down the hall in the dark. Little noises tickle at his brain, far-off traffic on the main drag that he shouldn’t be able to hear, a mouse or something scrabbling inside the wall, faint _ticktickticktick_ that if he didn’t know better he’d say is the dress watch John habitually leaves on the sink counter, no matter how many times Alex tells him it’s gonna get ruined that way.

Odd angle for his stress dreams to take, if preferable to ones he’s had in the past. He’ll have to see if anyone in the psych department can shed any light on this. Hah, funny joke. As if he’d trust a shrink with the contents of his head, much less an amateur shrink. He turns the corner, tile floor cool on his toes, gropes on the wall for the switch.

_Click_ goes the bathroom light as it turns on. Alex blinks into the bright blaze. Dark blur in front of him that comes slowly into focus as his eyes adjust.

A long moment of silence. The thing stares at him, round golden eyes like a pair of coins.

Alex screams.

He’s not conscious of staggering backwards—all he knows is that he hits the wall hard, his cry of terror terminating in a high whine as the breath whooshes out of him. His aching knees buckle, and he crumples to the floor. _Monster, monster, monster_ , his brain screeches, _monster in your house,_ and irrationally he wonders how the dog from this evening got into the apartment, how it found him, how it opened the door and hid itself without him noticing, even though only an idiot would mistake the thing in the bathroom for any kind of dog. _Run, run, run before it can catch you_ , and he would, but he hurts so much, his legs are killing him and they’ll never carry him fast enough to get away or to warn John and he looks down at them in a frenzy of frustration and fear and—

—he looks down at his legs, and—

—he looks back up through the bathroom door, into the bathroom where the monster is—

—into the _empty_ bathroom—

The whole world skips like a scratched CD. Here he is, yes, on the hallway floor, quite alone, no monster crouched over him or sinking its fangs into his jugular. Clear line of sight from where he’s sitting to the sink and the mirror over it. His legs stretched out in front of him.

His legs, which are covered with a layer of thick, dark hair, shading to tan around mid-calf. Not his feet, at the ends of them. In a haze of icy disbelief, he curls his toes. The—the _paws_ in front of him stretch and flex. Okay.

He breathes in, slow and deep and steadying.

And then he’s screaming again, screaming until he can taste blood on the back of his tongue, high shrill hysterical sound. He claws at his legs, at the hair—the, the _fur_ on them, but then flinches and jerks his hands up in front of his face, because _those aren’t his hands either_ , they’re covered with fur as well, the nails twisted into dark, blunt claws, leathery pads on his fingertips and the arcs of his palms.

Alex presses up against the wall reflexively, every nerve in his body begging him to flee, but there’s nowhere to go, nowhere for him to flee the twisted limbs that jerk and flail as he moves what his brain tells him are his own arms and legs. The pain hasn’t left him, either, and every motion stabs what feels like the blunt point of a butter knife into the soft hollows of his joints, digs it in and twists. He can barely think through the deluge of terror and sensation, but floating up through the white-noise roar, a dreadful, inevitable realization. _There’s nothing else in this hallway. No one here but you._

_Nothing for you to see in the bathroom but_ your own reflection.

Which means, which means—that _thing_ —that _face_ , if you can call it a face—

“Alex? _Alex!_ ”

The bedroom door opens, the hinges squealing louder than gunfire, and there’s a thunder of footsteps on the floor. Alex throws his arms over his face, cringes back against the wall as they approach. John, obviously, awakened by Alex’s screaming fit, but Alex’s brain rejects what it parses as yet another thing assaulting it, can’t bear this noisy moving breathing talking presence on top of all the everything, the way its footsteps stutter to a halt, the way it drags in a gasp that screeches against his awareness like a key scraped over steel wire.

“Alex, wh—what the fuck—?!”

“ _Don’t look at me_ ,” Alex howls. “Don’t look, don’t look, don’t, don’t, don’t…oh god oh god _oh god oh GOD_.” His voice shoots back up into a shriek, because he’s just felt his ears move, his fucking _ears_ , for chrissakes, both of them swiveling independently of each other and then flattening against the sides of his head, a good inch and a half above where they ought to sit. “No, no, no, I don’t want it, I don’t, it’s not me, it’s wrong, it’s wrong—”

“Hey. _Hey_. Alex, listen to me, breathe, all right? You have to breathe.” Rustle of fabric on fabric as John kneels down next to Alex. He’s talking, Alex notices, in his Emergency Voice, the low even tone that Alex has heard him use on spooked animals at the shelter. Alex lets out a scream of unhinged laughter into the crook of his own elbow. Spooked animal. Right, right, right, right, right. Because this whole nightmare needed _that_ particular dimension to it.

And oh, _oh_. Nightmare. Hadn’t he been thinking, earlier, hadn’t he noticed everything felt—? “Dreaming, dreaming, I’m dreaming,” Alex gabbles out. “It’s a bad dream, it’s all just a—I’m gonna wake up any second, yeah, I will, I just have to…”

“Babe,” says John, in that horrible, gentle voice, “this isn’t a dream. I’m right here with you. This is real.”

“No, no, you—of course you’d say that, you’re _in the dream_ ,” Alex barks, pawing at his face. This turns out to be a mistake, because the surface under his hands is very definitely not his face, irrespective of the fact that it’s attached to the front of his head. His face was never downed with fine hair before, his jaw was never so long, his forehead never sloped down like that to the tip of his nose, the bridge of which now sketches a long smooth line instead of its customary beaky curve. And then he’s shouting, “If I just wake myself up then this will all be gone and I’ll be back in the bed and nothing will have happened, nothing, nothing at all…”

“Stop that, stop it—”

“It’s not real, it’s not real, I’m dreaming and this is a nightmare and it’s not real and when I wake up everything’s going to be back to normal and it’s _not real—!_ ”

“Alex, STOP!”

Alex, busy tearing at his face with his new claws, isn’t expecting John’s touch on his wrist. _BadwrongthreatdangerBADBADBAD_ blares deafening and immediate through his brain, even though he knows, ostensibly, where he is and who’s touching him, and he _snarls_ at John, a guttural, blood-curdling sound pulled from depths in his chest that never existed before this moment. His lips curl back over his teeth, his ears go stiff and flat, and John reels backward, his jaw going slack with shock. _Yes, that’s right, run, you are enemy, you are not permitted to touch, you—_

—no, that’s John, that’s _John_ , what are you _doing_ , Alex, what is wrong with you? Alex’s awareness reels wildly; enemy is staring at him which is threat and John is staring at him with horror in his eyes and that is bad and his face, his ugly awful wrongwrongwrong face is uncovered. That last is what breaks the thread, and he collapses backwards, clapping his roughened palms over his face with a thin whimper, more like a kicked stray than a human being.

“I’m sorry.” John’s gone back to that voice of forced calm. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I won’t touch you if you don’t want me to.”

Alex makes an indistinct sound in the back of his throat. Doesn’t open his mouth. If he feels this face in motion, all its alien shapes and lines, he’s sure he’s going to die right here on the floor. It’s too much, it’s all too much, his brain is too loud and his body is all fucked up and he still _hurts_ , all over, so badly that he wants to tear his own skin off in chunks to escape from it.

“Your arm,” John half-whispers, then. “What happened to your arm?”

That’s enough of a non sequitur to startle words out of him again. “Wh—it—I—” Alex pulls his hands away just enough to dart a glance down at his arm; sure enough, the sleeve of his sweatshirt has ridden up, high enough for John to see his clumsy bandage job. “I got—bitten. By a weird dog. When I was coming back from the interview.”

“You got bitten. By a dog. And you didn’t tell me?”

“It wasn’t that bad.” Alex’s voice pulls high and cringing as he tries to justify himself, which he hates, but he’s too overwrought to tone it down. He yanks his sleeve over the bandage. “It wasn’t—it barely bled at all, I cleaned it as soon as I got home, I didn’t want you to worry…”

“Don’t you think, maybe, that this would have been worth me worrying about?” John’s Emergency Voice strung out horribly brittle, like one good tap would swing it over the edge into a panic just like Alex’s.

“It wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t. I was dealing with it. And, and, and—what, what are you saying, John, what are you saying,” Alex adds, that shrill laughter slipping out of him again, “that I got bit by a monster dog and now I’m turning into a _werewolf_ , or what the fuck ever? Is that it? Is that the level of discourse we’re at? You’re a fucking vet, John, I am not hearing this from you right now.”

No response. John just looks at him, his eyes wide and solemn.

“I’m not—I’m _not_.” Pleading. “I can’t—no. That’s impossible. It’s crazy.”

“Do you have a better explanation?”

“I…this is…” Alex moans, his fingers playing convulsively over his cheeks. His sense of touch is muted through the thickened skin, but he can still feel, distantly, the texture of the hair growing there. It’s not like stubble. Not even close. “I don’t know, I don’t know what’s happening to me…”

“I don’t either,” John says. “I don’t know what this is. But for now, we should go to the hospital and…”

“You think they’re gonna know what to do with me at a fucking hospital?!” Alex rasps. “ _Look at me_ , John. When’ve you ever seen something like this in the goddamn emergency room?”

“I…haven’t,” John says slowly. “I’m not a doctor, though, so—”

“No hospitals.”

“Alex—”

“ _No hospitals_.” Alex’s voice cracks, wobbles too-low. A breath of that monstrous growl from before.

“Okay. Fine. That’s—your call.” John rocks back on his heels, lets out an explosive sigh that ruffles the curls hanging into his face. “But, like. Is there anything we can do for you here? Anything I can do, right now?”

_For starters, you can stop fucking_ looking _at me, I hate it, it’s badwrongthreathurtsbad._ Alex can’t bring himself to say that, though. Not with John making that face at him. “…Advil,” he grunts at last. “I’m—it hurts. A lot.”

“Yeah. Yeah, of course.” John fetches the bottle from the medicine cabinet and hands it to Alex, who shakes out an indiscriminate number of pills and gulps them down. Ignores John’s little noise of objection; he’s too busy grimacing at the bitter taste of the pills, and then asking himself why the fuck he was chewing them, just now, and then getting distracted by the scritch-scratch of coarse hairs against his hand from his upper lip. Apparently his mustache has taken this opportunity to grow out of control, on top of everything. Wonderful. Just wonderful.

He dares to glance up at John after a few minutes. “Th-thanks. Feels better,” he says, even though the painkillers haven’t kicked in yet, and he still feels like he’s been hit by a truck.

John nods a little jerkily. “Good. Does, does your arm still hurt? I could do up the bandage a little neater. If you wanted.”

“Uh—sure. Yeah.” Another minute or two of held breath as John digs his first aid kit out from under the sink, brings it over, kneels on the floor. He takes Alex’s arm, so gentle it almost makes Alex wish he’d grabbed it and dug his fingernails in instead. The gauze crinkles as John undoes the sloppily-applied adhesive.

They both blink down at the offending limb.

“Um.”

“I, I…”

“You did say the thing bit you _yesterday_ , right? I wasn’t making that up?”

“No,” Alex says miserably. “You weren’t.” He’s losing his mind. Has to be. That’s the only explanation for what he’s seeing right now. Which is his arm, covered in black-and-tan fur and terminating in something that’s more paw than hand, and between wrist and elbow where there should be a ragged bite mark…

John brushes aside a tuft of fur, his brow knitting. There’s something there, yes, the outline of the dog-thing’s teeth picked out in fresh scar, swollen and pink and sore like the skin under a picked-off scab. But it isn’t _right_. There’s no earthly way it could’ve healed over so quickly. He should start screaming again, Alex thinks, and then right on the heels of that, _but I’m so goddamn tired of all this_ bullshit.

He sighs, hollow and rattling as a last breath. Barely acknowledges it as John says, “Well, I’ll—I’ll just—get it covered up. Just in case,” replaces the bandaging all neat and tidy, lets his hand brush over the back of Alex’s. His fingers are shaking, even though his movements had been quick and sure as he’d dressed the wound. Alex doesn’t have the energy to tremble.

“It’s gonna be okay, Alex.” Weird that John felt the need to tack Alex’s name on to the end of that statement, since it can’t be aimed at him. He’s pretty sure nothing is ever going to be okay again. He swallows, licks his lips. His tongue flicks over a little nick in the middle of his upper lip that definitely wasn’t there when he went to bed. _Different_ thuds in his head, dull and final. _Wrong_. “Did you hear me? It’s gonna be fine, we’ll—we’ll figure it out.”

“Mmn.”

“Are you all right, sitting here? It doesn’t look very comfortable.”

“Mmhh. Mm-mm.”

“You wanna go back to bed? Or go sit on the couch?”

Alex considers silently. He’s tired, tired, so so tired, his brain all but dribbling out his ears with fatigue at all the screaming it’s been doing, but—living room’s closer. And he’s still in pain. And, despite his weariness, he has an inkling that he’s not going to be doing any more sleeping tonight.

“Hnnn—couch. P-please.”

“Sounds good, babe. I got you—there we go—”

_Creak, crunch_ go Alex’s hips as John hauls him to his feet, and Alex yelps and nearly falls flat on his face. His balance is all fucked, the blood surging through his head in a sudden rush of vertigo. John has to grip him hard around the chest to keep him from going down (ow), but the two of them manage not to eat shit, and John half-steers, half-drags Alex to the couch ( _ow_ —there’s a bad new stretch, almost a strain, in the shoulder of the arm Alex has slung around John, like it doesn’t want to reach out at that perfectly normal angle).

They crumple down onto it together, a horror-genre parody of their earlier bout of cuddling. Alex disentangles himself from John, scoots himself to the far end of the couch, scrunches against the arm. Curls up in a little ball, as though to protect his belly from scything claws, but he can still feel John staring sadly at him. That prickle from before cranked up into a burn between his shoulder blades. His ears twitch and go flat again (have they moved up higher on his head?)

“Don’t stare at me.”

“Sorry. Sorry.” A pause. “Can I hold you, or…?”

“No.”

“All right. I won’t.” John adjusts position on the couch. “I’m gonna—as long as we’re out here, I’m just gonna grab my phone, okay? I’ll be right back.”

“You should go to sleep,” Alex says hollowly, grinding his face into the sofa cushion. “Go back to bed. Just get some rest. You said it was gonna be fine.”

“I did say that,” John agrees, rising to his feet, and then repeats, “I’ll be right back.”

Alex makes a wordless noise of acknowledgement. _Sure, I can’t stop you_. He listens to John’s retreating footsteps, the _click_ of the charger jack unplugging, the soft _shff-shff_ of a pair of sweats getting pulled on. Is it going to be like this the whole night, all this noise, all this _presence_ , even when he’s alone in the room? He’ll die of a stress aneurysm before 3 AM at this rate. He tries to focus on lying very still, numbering his own ragged breaths. The repetitive uptick of the counter in his head is a little soothing. A little. Even though he loses count every time his joints buckle and twist. He thinks he can be excused for that, though, maybe.

John shuffles back into the room. “Alex?” he asks, and then, a little unnecessarily, “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.” Alex doesn’t reply, hoping John will think he’s fallen asleep, but then John sits down, close enough for his thigh to brush against Alex’s legs. Alex balls himself up smaller, ignoring the groans of protest from his skeleton.

“Don’t—don’t.” A barb of pain curls at the small of his back, making him whine under his breath. John swallows hard. His arm twitches, like he wants to reach for Alex, but he suppresses it.

“I won’t. I won’t do anything you don’t want me to. I’m just here. Right here. If you need anything.”

_Click-click-crack-creeeeeeak_ goes Alex’s spine. Alex presses his forehead to his knees, clenches his jaw against the pain. His teeth don’t quite seem to align properly anymore. _Just don’t go_ , whimpers a thin little voice in Alex’s head, an abandoned puppy sitting in a cardboard box by the river. _Please. It hurts. I’m scared. I don’t have a pack. I don’t have anyone but you. Don’t leave me alone._

That’s all too pathetic to dream of saying, though, so Alex just grunts. After a while puts a hand out for John to cover with one of his own. That feels weird, a tickling itching tingle of discomfort boring through the center of Alex’s palm. Alex doesn’t pull his hand away, though, and neither does John.

And that’s about what they can do.


	2. Chapter 2

So, failed step one: John had really intended to stay up until Alex fell asleep. Never mind that that wouldn’t have actually done anything to rectify the situation—it’s the principle of the thing, okay, a gesture of solidarity, proof that Alex doesn’t have to go this alone, whatever the fuck _this_ actually is. _I don’t care that you woke up in the middle of the night sprouting fur and fangs, I’m not going anywhere, I love you and I’m here to do anything that needs to be done_.

Except John’s body clock has always been relentless on the “8+ hours of sleep per night or so help me god” setting, so here he is.

He wakes from a hazy dream—something to do with alligators and the Six Flags theme park his family used to frequent when he was a kid—with a crick in his neck from the lumpy couch cushions and something soft tickling his nose. “Mhhrrgg,” he groans, swiping at it with his hand. He’s expecting to get his fingers tangled in a hank of his own curls, but the thing he touches is velvety-textured with fine fur, warm, and flexible like the cartilage at the tip of your nose, or your ear—

“Alex!” John yelps, memory flooding back in. The warm weight leaning on his shoulder jerks in surprise and heaves itself off him, and John blinks hard as he looks Alex full in the face for the first time since last night.

It’s, still, vaguely recognizable as Alex’s face.

Very, very vaguely.

The expression, at least, is right, that displeased squint that Alex gets when he hasn’t had enough rest, the wrinkle between his brows. Which aren’t brows anymore so much as spots of tan fur on his forehead, visible only by contrast with the dark brown fur covering the rest of it, creeping down from his hairline. His face now pushes out into something you could call a muzzle, albeit a broad, blunt, pit bull-ish one. There’s only a trace of high arching bridge visible in the slope from brow to (visibly wet, leathery) tip of nose. And of course there are those ears, which no amount of mental gymnastics can characterize as anything but canine. They’re each the size of John’s open hand, pointed and furred, and situated directly on top of Alex’s head so they stick absurdly out of his untidy hair. And aside from all that—

“I told you not to stare at me,” Alex grunts. He scratches at his bandaged arm with a short-fingered hand, the corners of his mouth tensing. _Precursor to biting, back off_ , whispers John’s animal handling training. He waves that off as best he can; Alex isn’t a dog, stupid, if he’s uncomfortable he’ll tell you with his words. Even so, he glances away, down at his knees.

“Sorry. Um. How are you feeling—?”

“Like shit. What do you think.”

“Yeah. Right. Sorry.” Alex lets out a few wheezing breaths while John tries to regroup, stares down at John’s bandage job on his arm. John watches out of the corner of his eye as Alex picks at the medical tape and winces when it sticks to a tuft of matted fur.

“It’s—still happening.” There’s a faint new lisp to his words, a blurring of consonants around lengthened teeth and skewed jaw.

“Yeah,” John repeats, for lack of anything better to say.

“It doesn’t, fucking, it doesn’t make sense.”

“I think,” John says, “we might be a little past the realm of _things making sense_. Given that. You know. You’re currently a w—”

“Don’t. Do not fucking say that word. I never want to hear you say it, ever again.”

John gently does not point out that Alex was in fact the only one of them to use the _w-word_ last night. He sits there in silence as Alex pats at the sides of his own head, gropes up to the top, flinches as his fingers contact his pointed ears. He snatches his hands away and clenches them in his lap.

“It’s not—it’s not even full moon,” Alex goes on, a little compulsively, as though if he works through every illogical point of this scenario it’ll vanish away like a dream. “I remember looking through the window, last night, and thinking—so it makes no sense for me to be—and it’s fucking _daytime_ right now, even, it’s not goddamn _fair_.” Alex pauses for a moment, and then says, “Oh, wait. Fuck. _Fuck_.”

“What?”

“What time is it?”

“Um…” John fumbles in the sofa cushions for his phone, dropped when he’d fallen asleep with it in his hand last night. “It’s—8:45. 8:43, I mean, but—”

“Shit. Oh, god, fuck. It’s a school day.” He clutches at his furry face, peers at John wide-eyed from between his stubby fingers. “John, I can’t go to class like this.”

God, of course that’s what Alex would be concerned about right now. John would laugh out loud at how by-the-numbers it all is, if it weren’t for the unwholesome shine in Alex’s eyes. One wrong move and he’ll go to pieces, just like last night.

They’re playing this gentle, then. Which isn’t usually John’s forte, but lucky them, his brain’s slotted this neatly into the Emergency folder, i.e. the fix-things-now-crash-later folder. So, he’s fixing things. “Given the, um. Circumstances. You’re probably justified in taking a sick day.”

“I’m—but I’m not _sick_ , I’m—”

“—Unable to teach in your current physical state, yeah, sounds like a sick day to me,” John interrupts loudly. “Unless you have a better way of putting it in an email. I couldn’t do it without using the w-word, but you’re a better writer than me, maybe you can figure it out.”

That was maybe a bit too flip, John thinks, but Alex doesn’t break down in hysterical tears that very second, just keeps glaring through his fingers. “And, I mean,” John goes on, “you’re already gonna be late, even if you sprint for the bus.”

Alex chokes out something that might’ve been a laugh in a former life. “Fuck. Yeah, no. I’m not gonna be sprinting anytime soon. Not that I ever did much of that.”

“So…you might as well call it in, while you still have time.”

Alex grunts. He stretches one leg out; both of them wince in unison at the pop his hip makes. “Fine,” Alex snaps. “Fine, I’ll—stupid, fucking—” He reaches over John for his laptop, opens Gmail, bashes out an email, curled on his side with an expression on his face like this is all an unwarranted personal attack. His enormous ears, John notices, have airplaned out to either side, precisely like a dog on the defensive.

…He’s really got to stop comparing Alex to a dog in his head, or he’s gonna get himself in trouble. To distract himself, he unlocks his phone and pecks out an email of his own, CC’ed to his professors and his advisor. Like hell is he going to leave Alex alone right now, even if he’s missing lab for it—oh, shit, lab _and_ a meeting with Nette. Well, he’ll just have to reschedule that, an hour of blah-blah about his embarrassing difficulties in undergrad and how he will very extremely for sure never have them again is definitely less important than keeping an eye on this situation. And Nette’s cool, in that Hip Young Faculty sort of way, she’ll understand. John suppresses a groan, kneads at his temple as he taps _Send_. At least it’s a Friday, and they’ve got all weekend for this nightmare to clear up.

( _If_ it clears up. Right?)

The breath catches in his throat.

(It didn’t go away with moon-set, who’s to say a day or two more will make any difference? You don’t know how this works. It’s not science. Anything’s possible. What if it doesn’t get better?)

(What if it gets worse?)

John’s trying to shake off the chill of that possibility when Alex’s clawed fingers hit the trackpad with a sharp _tack-tack_.

“There. Sent.” He slams his laptop shut. Little wrinkles on his muzz—on his _nose_ that make it obvious he’s only just resisting the urge to bare his teeth. “I’m officially wasting a day doing nothing.”

“You’re taking a day to get better,” John says. Hopes he doesn’t sound too fake-cheerful. “Are you, uh, still very sore? Do you wanna get more Advil?”

“I,” Alex says, with feeling, “would _kill_ for some more Advil.”

“Okay, well—let’s start with getting to the bathroom, and then we can talk murders, sound good?” John’s attempt at a joke falls flat; Alex just makes a disgusted noise in the back of his throat and sits up on the couch, hunched over on himself with the pain of it. John helps him to his feet. The sick little puppy whimpers of last night seem to have given way to prickly frustration, and Alex is huffing and blowing with unvoiced annoyance all the way down the hall.

John gets unceremoniously thrown out once they make it to the bathroom—“I have to _piss_ , John, I don’t need you to hold my dick for me,” Alex snaps, throwing the medicine cabinet open and digging for the Advil bottle. John retreats into the hall, albeit not quick enough to miss seeing the number of tablets Alex shakes out into his palm.

“Christ, Alex—”

Alex growls. Nothing near that horrible trapped-animal snarl from last night, but definitely an echo of it. John gets the message. The door slams shut behind him as he hurries out to the front of the apartment.

All right, so Alex needs some space. That’s fine, even if John can’t exactly feel good about the amount of ibuprofen he’s currently choking down. He’ll just get started on breakfast, as long as he’s here. He’d like to be able to say that he _tried_ to mitigate the bout of painful indigestion that Alex is about to give himself. He pulls out eggs, bacon, bread from the pantry, a bag of frozen hash browns from the freezer. Maybe that’s not the best meal for someone in the throes of a supernatural transformation, although John can’t really speak to what all the everything is doing to Alex’s digestive tract, but if there’s one thing he learned from Mom, it’s that someone going through hard times cannot and must not be left hungry.

The bacon has just started to sizzle in the pan when Alex lets out a sort of choked shriek from the bathroom. John nearly drops the spatula on his foot. “Fuck—babe? You okay?”

“ _Fine_.” That note of hysteria is starting to creep back into his voice again. Oh, no.

“Do you need me to—”

“ _Never come in, I am fine, do not look at me, do not think about me, I will know if you do._ ”

“…Okay.” With a great effort of will, John turns away, picks up the spatula, scrubs it off, goes back to his pan of bacon. Don’t worry about it, don’t worry about it. Focus on what you can fix, not…whatever horrifying new thing Alex has discovered now. It’s probably a good sign that Alex has enough energy to make a joke. At least, John hopes it’s a joke. Can were—can, er, _w-words_ read minds? He doesn’t think so, but, again, neither of them understand how this works.

This necessitates a short Wikipedia rabbit hole on the finer points of the _Twilight_ series, which John hasn’t thought about since Melly was obsessed with them back in middle school and which he sort of hoped he’d never have to think about again. He furrows his brow and frowns down at a list of characters he’s sure are made up as he listens to the bathroom door opening, shuffling footsteps retreating down the hallway and into the bedroom. _Don’t chase him, don’t crowd him, let him come to you, he will when he’s ready_ , he chides himself, and then tacks on, _and stop thinking about your boyfriend like he’s a skittish stray, you incurable asshole._

That instinct turns out to be correct, though; about fifteen minutes later, Alex flits past the kitchen door, having thrown on a pair of sweats over his boxers and swapped out his ratty Columbia sweatshirt for an equally ratty hoodie, all the better to hide his ears. Maybe it’s just John’s imagination, but it seems like Alex’s muzzle has gotten longer. He can certainly see a lot more scowl than he’d expect to be visible past the edge of the hood.

John considers asking about that scream from a few minutes ago. Reconsiders. It would do them both good to wait to engage with…whatever…until after they’ve gotten some food in them. See, he’s being responsible.

“Breakfast’s ready. ’S getting cold.”

“Not hungry.”

“It’s almost 10 in the morning, Alex. And you haven’t had coffee or anything.”

“Mm. Speaking of—”

“No way.” Yeah, the last thing they need is to give Alex’s panic a good big caffeine jolt.

Alex turns his head just enough for John to catch a flicker of baleful yellow under the hood. He scoffs—or maybe _hruffs_ would be the more accurate term. There’s something, um…woofy, about that sound.

“Aren’t you hot with all those clothes on? You don’t have to—I mean, it’s just us here, you were okay in your boxers, and you’ve got all that, um—”

“ _Fuck_ you, John Laurens.” The sudden vehemence in Alex’s voice makes John take an involuntary step backwards. “Fuck you. All that what? Go on, say it, asshole—”

“—All that fur,” John interrupts. He doesn’t mean for it to come out so sharp, but he’s tired, and confused, and more than a little scared, so sue him for letting the Gentle Caretaker persona slip a little. “It’s fur. And I’m just trying to make sure you’re comfortable, but if it makes you feel better to sit there and sweat like a hog, then be my guest.”

Alex faces John fully to bare his teeth (and god, oh, god, but his teeth have gotten sharp). “Oh, you think this is funny? That I’m just gonna stand here and let you make jokes and laugh in my face about it?”

“Jesus Christ, Alex, who here is making a joke? I’m stating the facts. You have fur. It gets stuffy in this apartment.”

“I. Do not. Have. _Fur_ ,” Alex grits out. “This, this, all this _bullshit_ is not mine. And it’s not me. And once it’s gone—”

“We’ll all have a great laugh about the time Alex turned into an American w-word in London, yeah.” John gestures at the stove. “For now, at least fuckin’ eat something so the ibuprofen doesn’t burn a hole in your stomach lining.”

“You—!” Alex begins, but then stops, his whole body jerking like an invisible person’s just elbowed him in the ribs. The snarl slides off his face, replaced with a very strange expression that John can’t parse, even with the new canine context. He does an odd little wriggle in place.

“Alex…?”

“Food sounds great,” Alex says, in a strained voice. He visibly suppresses another wriggle. “Yeah. Now that you mention it. I could eat. Th-thanks. For making it.”

John blinks. “Really? We’re just—done with that?”

“Yep. I was being an ass. Stupid. Sorry. No point in talking about it. Think about something else for a while.” He shuffles to the stove, stiff-legged, hunches over it like a gargoyle.

It’s beyond obvious that this is a front; Alex is a terrible actor, for one thing, and for another, if Alex has ever considered any altercation to be beyond debate in his entire life, John will eat the spatula in his hand. But in all honesty, John doesn’t have the energy to juggle a full-on nasty fight with Alex and the fact of his lycanthropy right now, so he just sighs and leans against the counter while Alex helps himself.

(Shit, is he allowed to say “lycanthropy”? He’d better be, because he feels real fuckin’ stupid calling it “the l-word”.)

“There’s toast, too,” John says after a minute or so of terse silence. “Butter and jam are in the fridge. Wasn’t sure which one you wanted.”

“Mmffmm.”

“Wh—do you want a _plate_ , Alex?”

“Nnnff.” Alex picks a third strip of bacon out of the frying pan and more or less inhales it before John’s eyes. “’S good.”

“Well—uh. That’s good.”

Alex ignores him, goes in for round four, cleans the grease off his hands with quick, eager little licks. There’s something weird about the angle of his thumbs, but before John can place it, Alex has moved on to the scrambled eggs. Which he eats directly out of the pan as well, not bothering to use his hands as he leans over the stove and gulps them down. There’s a blank sort of eagerness in his eyes—no, no, not eagerness. John would almost call it _desperation_. Like a starving animal trying to choke down as much food as it can before something bigger and stronger snatches it away. It’s not an Alex expression. Not even close.

“I’ll,” John squeaks. Clears his throat. “Maybe. I’ll just. I’ll have the toast.”

Alex _whuffs_ , maybe in assent, maybe just breathing heavily from the exertion of downing that much food in a single go, and doesn’t stop eating. Yes, John decides, his muzzle has in fact gotten both longer and slimmer, less bulldoggish and more—well.

More wolfish.

He tears his eyes away from the sight of Alex’s lolling, red, far-too-long tongue licking the frying pan clean, and focuses on the simple tasks of making toast. Bread in the toaster. Jam out of the fridge. Wash the knife. Don’t listen to the noises of your boyfriend shoveling down an entire plate of hash browns meant to serve two with leftovers. Don’t flinch when he finally steps back, says _god, that was good_ as if what just happened was totally normal, and returns to his spot on the couch.

Once Alex is out of his line of sight, John has to grip the counter hard to keep from falling over. He’s the one breathing hard now, his chest heaving like he’s just run a marathon.

_What if this gets worse?_

John shoves the mental image of the flat, unthinking shine in Alex’s eyes to the back recesses of his brain.

He’s starting to form a very, very unpleasant picture of just how much worse this could get.

 

***

 

The hours crawl by. John knows he should probably be working on grading or a problem set of his own as long as he’s just sitting around the house, but for some strange reason he can’t seem to focus on school stuff. He ends up slumped at the kitchen table, flipping back and forth between the Facebook and Instagram tabs in his browser, trying his best not to jump up and ask a hundred mother hen-ish questions whenever he hears Alex shift position on the couch or make a little noise to himself.

He mostly keeps that impulse in check. You’d think it would get easier with time, since Alex responds to John’s careful check-ins with grunts and rolled eyes at best and very nasty comments at worst, so they’re clearly not doing much to help the situation. But John does have eyes. So John can’t quite stop asking.

Because it is obvious, even from his vantage point in the neutral zone of the kitchen, that matters are not improving.

He’d assumed that Alex’s hunched posture was a product of his aching back, but even after the morning’s monster dose of Advil he hasn’t straightened back up. His frame looks all wrong under the oversized hoodie: the sleeves hang loose and awkward over his shoulders, which have narrowed and pulled forward, while his ribs have bowed out, stretching the sweatshirt over a new barrel chest. He’s dispensed with the hood as well, and John can see the little motions of his enormous ears out of the corner of his eye, the way they flicker towards the noise of passing cars and chirping birds outside before returning to an irritable half-mast.

Alex himself, though, seems determined to ignore the slow creep of his body away from humanity. 3 PM, and he’s still, still, still there on the couch, frowning at some Twitter feud on his laptop, reaching over to check his phone and grunt at the state of his notifications, turning back to peck his own response to the trolls into the _new Tweet_ field. Every so often he does another one of those weird little squirms, his face going pale (metaphorically, anyway, you can’t see the skin on his face anymore through all the fur). He shakes those off fast, though, snorts at himself and rubs his eyes and dives back into his social media with a new fervor. A truly admirable show of stoicism in the face of the unknown.

If he has to sit through this any longer, John thinks, he is going to jump out of his own skin.

The silent treatment itself isn’t new; Alex will sometimes resort to that if he’s really upset, although it never lasts more than a day. But coupled with the earlier blank-eyed compulsive eating, it takes on a new and altogether more worrying dimension. John—isn’t thinking about that dimension. Absolutely not. An Alex who not only won’t but _can’t_ argue with him isn’t something that should exist, even in concept.

He’s made up his mind to go and goad Alex into a fight, just to prove they haven’t hurtled over the event horizon while he wasn’t paying attention, when Alex groans loudly and sits up, attempting to roll his shoulders but failing to do more than scrunch them forward and back. John jumps out of his chair and hurries into the living room as Alex gets to his feet, wobbling a little as he stands (inexplicably) on tiptoe.

“Hey—you feeling—?”

“Better? No. Like shit still? Yes. Come on, John, keep up,” Alex grumbles. Well, all right. John’s still counting sarcasm as a good sign, even if it’s coming at his own expense.

“Anything I can get you?”

“Yeah, because the fact that I’m _standing up_ doesn’t mean I’m perfectly capable of helping myself.” His nose wrinkles, deep furrows visible for a moment in the tan fur along the bridge of his muzzle. “God, relax. I was just gonna get more Advil.”

“Uh, are you sure? Maybe you should give it a rest for a bit longer, you had so much this morning.” _And if we're being honest, dogs really, really, really shouldn’t have ibuprofen_ , he carefully does not add, no matter how hard he’s thinking it. And oh, god, when did he stop making an effort to not think of Alex as a dog?

“Yes, John, I am sure, because surprise, surprise, my back is fucking killing me. And my shoulders. And my hips. And everything, really, so. Fucking _fuck_.” He winces and, with something of an effort, rocks back on his heels to stand flat-footed. His legs buckle, and his sweats puddle around his ankles as he stands there bowlegged and horribly bent. He’s lost a few inches of height, and as he bows his head all defensive the thick ruff of fur poking out of the collar of his sweatshirt brushes his chin. John knows for a fact that Alex has only ever been able to grow three chest hairs at a time, max.

He’s going to throw up.

“Hey,” John says, in a voice he has to fight to keep level. “Um.” _We should really talk about the fact that you’re turning into a canine and the implications for our next steps, here_ , is what ought to come out, but the words get tangled around his tongue.

Alex is way ahead of him, though, as usual. “I know, I know, I _know_ , John, Jesus fucking Christ, do you think I can’t fucking see?!” Alex barks. He twists his hands in the hem of his hoodie—god, no, John can’t call them that in good conscience anymore. He twists his paw-hands, with their long narrow fur-covered palms and back-set thumbs, in the hem of his hoodie. “I am _trying_. To _do something._ About all this _bullshit_. Aside from just sitting there and waiting to see what awesome, wonderful, totally not gross thing happens to me _next._ And believe me, every single fucking thing that has happened to me in the past 12 hours has fit that fucking profile.”

“Right, but at the same time—”

“No, don’t start with me. Do not. Because you have no idea—I feel like someone’s been beating my entire skeleton with a stick, and my teeth are all jacked up, and my ears keep moving around, and I can hear _everything_ and smell _everything_ and my head aches and oh, don’t even ask what’s happening down here—“ he gestures viciously in a general below-the-waist direction, “—because if I tell you you’re gonna start screaming and running for the hills and I don’t quite have the energy to deal with that at the— _YAIIIIEEEEEK_!”

The scream comes so loud and sudden that John recoils with the shock of it. For a wild second, reeling with confusion, he can’t turn up an explanation for what’s happening; all he can do is react, straight from the hindbrain. He cries out himself, his hands coming up to shield his face from an imagined attacker.

Several things happen in rapid succession after that.

“No, no, NO NO NO NO FUCK NO _NO_!” Alex howls. _Something happened to Alex something’s wrong with Alex help Alex fix it fix it_ John’s brain shrills unhelpfully, and as it does something heavy rams into John’s leg and glances off, making him flinch to the side. He whirls around just in time to catch Alex’s form scuttle out of the room, low to the ground on all fours like some kind of weird cryptid.

“What—fuck—Alex, wait, dammit!”

Alex has never been an athletic sort, to John’s knowledge. Certainly he’s never been a match for John, who did swim team in high school and through college and has a workout routine and occasionally goes running just for fun. But somehow, he manages to get himself down the hall and into the bedroom and slam the door behind himself in the time it takes John to cross the living room. John curses, takes the hall in a few long strides, rams his shoulder against the bedroom door.

It doesn’t budge. This would be less startling if there were, say, any kind of working lock on the door, but their landlord has thus far had better things to do than respond to their fix-it requests. John can hear Alex’s ragged breathing just inside the room. He jiggles the knob, gives the door another shove. Nothing but a frightened noise from Alex. Christ, is he holding the door closed? When the fuck did he get so strong?

“Alex, please, let me in!”

“No, no, no, no, no, no—”

“I’m not going to hurt you, for fuck’s sake, I just wanna know what happened, are you hurt, are you in pain—?”

“No no no no no go away go away _go away_ —”

“I’m not going away, this is my goddamn house too, and I’m trying to help, I want to help you and _I don’t know what to do_ —”

“Leave, leave, please please just leave, don’t look at me, I don’t want, I can’t, I can’t—”

“Can I call the hospital now? Please, Alex, can I just fucking call a doctor about this?”

“No no no no _no no no no noooooooo_ —”

“Then what do I do? What the fuck am I supposed to do? I’m _scared_ , Alex, I’m fucking _scared_!”

The words tear out of John in a jagged rush; he half-imagines they’ll cut his lips. Not useful, not helping, but he’s hit a wall here. There’s nothing else he can do but admit it. He slams his fist against the door, not trying to knock it open. Just heartsick. Just lost. Just, to his bones, to his marrow, scared, scared, scared.

The door opens by a crack. A sliver of black-furred face visible, a golden eye blinking at him.

“Babe,” John croaks. Alex regards him a moment longer before silently pulling the door the rest of the way open, shuffling back a few steps so John can enter the room. They stare at each other, John shaking a little bit, Alex swaying on his tiptoes. Before John can add anything to that previous thought, Alex lets out a low, pained whimper, like he can’t help himself, turns around so he’s facing away from John, and tugs his sweats and boxers down in back.

John knows what he’s going to see there an instant before his eyes get the message to his brain. Even so, it knocks the wind out of him.

There’s an odd little stump a couple inches long protruding from the small of Alex’s back, on a level with his hips. The fur creeping over the rest of his body doesn’t seem to have quite made its way there; it’s more fuzzy than anything, a hint of pale skin visible through a thin layer of hair. It twitches as John stares at it.

It is, unmistakably, a tail.

“Ah,” John says. That’s all he’s got. Alex has a tail. His boyfriend is _growing_ a _tail_. And there’s nothing John can do about it. And there’s no reason to believe it’s not going to get worse from here, that the tail (his tail, _Alex’s_ tail) is going to grow longer and longer and Alex’s face is going to slip further and further away from anything that John recognizes and the silences will stretch and stretch until there’s no words left to fill them, and—

“So,” Alex says, his voice threatening to break, “when I—change all the way—I know I’ll probably be beyond caring, but, like. Where’s the nearest wildlife refuge?” He hitches up his sweats over his stumpy tail, turning to face John, although he doesn’t make eye contact. He lets out a sick little laugh. “I’d say _where’s the nearest national park_ , but since this is, you know, communicable, it’s probably best for me to be set free far away from people, so wildlife refuge would be better…”

“Don’t say that. We don’t know that anything else is gonna happen. We don’t.” Weak, but he has to try. Alex lays his head to the side, his eyebrow spots knitting and unknitting with something very like pity.

“Here’s a question. When do werewolves turn into wolves? No, it’s fine, I’m saying the word, I don’t care. When do they do it?”

“No, this isn’t like that, it’s not anything like the movies or whatever, we don’t know—”

“When, John?”

“It could be a completely different process, what if—”

“ _When_.”

“…Full moon.”

“Night after tomorrow night. I checked a lunar calendar this afternoon. So I figure I’ve—I’ve got about two days left. And then…”

He brings a paw-hand up, spreads his clenched fingers. Dust in the wind. John is having trouble breathing around the lump in his throat.

“I was thinking,” Alex continues, “since the weekend’s tomorrow, maybe we could drive out then to wherever it is we have to go, to make sure I’m there when I—when the time comes.”

“You’re being an idiot. I’m not dumping you in the woods. I’m not leaving you anywhere. Not now, not ever. Jesus.”

“I don’t wanna hurt you,” Alex says, an insistent quaver in his voice. “I’m trying to be pragmatic. I’m a lost cause at this point. No, no, let me finish. This isn’t—there’s probably no cure, right? Like, we’d, people would _know_ if there was a thing going around where you turn into a wolf, but you could just go to the doctor and get it fixed. So I’m gone. Fine. But you’re still clean, so there’s no point in putting yourself at risk if you can just quarantine patient zero.”

“Listen to yourself! This isn’t a zombie movie, Alex, we don’t have to do this, fucking, this fucking Walking Dead survival-of-the-fittest shit, I’m telling you I’m not going to just abandon you in the wilderness! And besides, if I did do that you’d starve in a week, if the elements didn’t get you first, you don’t even hike unless I drag you—”

“Look, asshole, not all of us were fucking Eagle Scouts—”

“—but it doesn’t matter, does it?” John goes on, seizing desperately on a spark of inspiration. “It, it doesn’t matter, because you’re not _going_ to bite anyone, are you? We’re having this conversation, you’re still _you_ , you didn’t go around chomping on people before all this, so why would we assume you’d suddenly start now? You’re not some kind of monster…”

He trails off, the pure ridiculousness of that statement strangling him. Maybe he believes that, deep down, but his eyes are giving him a whole other set of evidence. And there’s more to it than just what he can see. Alex exhales, a soft chuff of breath that could be sob or snarl.

“Last night. I was scared, I didn’t mean to act the way I did, but…well. I did it anyway, didn’t I.”

“Yeah,” John mumbles.

“And then, this morning, too, with breakfast.”

“You remember that?”

“I was hungry, not brain-dead. And yeah, I remember. How it felt.” His tongue flickers out to wet what remains of his lips. He doesn’t elaborate. Easy enough to fill in the blanks, though: _my mind isn’t safe. Neither is my body. And when I lose both of those, what will you do?_

“There’s gotta be something,” John rasps. “Something we’re not seeing. Something we can do.”

“There’s nothing.”

“There has to be.”

“There’s not.”

“If we just think, if we just—”

“Christ, John, you’re not making this any easier!” Alex snaps, frustrated. He pushes his hands through his hair. It’s changed texture, up from his hairline and down along his sideburns, grown shorter and finer to blend in with the fur on his face. “Who’s it helping to try and fight a losing battle like this? Who does it benefit? Think about your own safety for _once_ , because when I die, you’re—w-when I—when I die—”

“You’re not going to die.” John’s voice comes out much higher-pitched than he means it to. Oddly, Alex doesn’t object to the interruption. “Now you’re just talking out your ass. You’re—you’re changed, not sick. You’re not dying. No one’s gonna die.”

“Well, actually. If you think about it.” The corners of Alex’s mouth lift in an awful little rictus grin. “My body’s gonna be gone. Broken down into—or, no. Upcycled. Upcycled, that’s a nice way to put it. Into some other living thing. Like decomposition. Food chain. Only faster. And my mind’s gonna be gone too. Just. No longer in residence. Bye-bye, intellect. So long, higher brain functions. Adiós, everything that makes Alexander Hamilton different from any Joe Schmoe on the street.”

“Shut up. Shut up.”

“So I might as well be dead. As good as. And it’s better than being in limbo, right? Better than being stuck in-between like this.”

“Don’t fucking say that.”

“But it is. Isn’t it? Isn’t it?”

Alex finally locks eyes with John. Cold dreadful shine there, dull and gold and alien, but John refuses to bend to it. _It’s not. It’s not. Can’t you see that it’s not? Tell me you can see. Tell me._

 _For god’s sake,_ tell me _._

And then Alex breaks.

“It’s—no, it’s not, it’s not, fuck, fuck, fuck, John, fuck—”

John stumbles backwards as he suddenly finds himself with an armful of sobbing werewolf. Alex clutches at him, his claws scraping through John’s shirt and his limbs poking out at all the wrong angles. It’s not like holding Alex used to be—there’s much _more_ of him now, despite the loss of height, and he feels so much more solid and wiry, but John does his best, wrapping his arms around Alex and sinking down to the floor with him. He pets at the tangle of fur and hair at the base of Alex’s skull, wonders if that’ll give offense, decides that right about now he doesn’t particularly care, as long as it comforts Alex first and foremost.

“Babe, I’m here. As long as you need me.”

“How long, but h-h-how fucking long will I—” Alex wails. “I’m turning into a wolf. I have a fucking _tail_. I, I, I crawled on the _ground_ like a god damn _animal_.”

John doesn’t have a response to that, because Alex is, and he does, and he did. Alex’s face isn’t flat enough for him to hide it against John’s shoulder, but he presses forehead and muzzle flat against John’s chest, his ears drooping down so far they’re practically hidden in his scraggly hair.

“I don’t wanna be an animal.” He curls in on himself, his hips canting to tuck a tail that isn’t long enough to reach between his legs. “I don’t wanna die. Not now, not like this.”

“I know. Oh, Alex, I know.”

“I’m not this thing—I am _Alexander Hamilton_ , I’m _me_ , I’m not this dumb hungry animal who’s too stupid to even dream, I’m not—I haven’t done anything, I haven’t had time, I can’t, not yet, I’m not ready—”

The knot in John’s throat has gotten so tight it’s agonizing. He opens his mouth, drags in a breath to try and loosen it, hoping by the time he’s done that he’ll have come up with the perfect thing to say, the thing to dispel all of Alex’s fears, to reassure him that it’ll be all right in the end, that he’ll fix this, somehow. He’ll fix everything.

What comes out is, “You can’t. You can’t die. Alex, Alex, you can’t die, you can’t go, you can’t leave me.”

“It’s not fair. After everything. After all the fucking _bullshit._ It’s not _fair_.”

“It’s not. God, it’s not. But I don’t know what to do, Alex, I can’t fix this. Just, please, please don’t go.”

Alex lets out a wounded yowl and crushes himself against John so hard that John is forced onto his back on the carpet. John lets him. He’s crying too hard himself to put a stop to anything. It’s like Jemmy all over again, like Mom, a loss so quick and complete it shocks you to an utter standstill. _Laurens men are fighters, Laurens men don’t bawl like babies, we stay strong for the people who need us_ , scolds a voice in John’s head, but he can’t fight, he doesn’t have any more strength in him, no matter how much Alex needs him.

He needs Alex too, needs his temper and his loud mouth and his brilliance and his secret tenderness. All of those things are about to disappear forever, and John can’t bear it. Selfish, he knows. Only thinking of himself. But if Alex dies, if John loses yet another person that he should have protected, that he had a responsibility to love and keep safe…

“Agh,” John says, because something warm and damp has flickered over his cheeks. He squints up through tear-matted lashes. A huge dark blot in his vision that slowly resolves into the whiskery tip of Alex’s muzzle. Alex whines at him and pokes his tongue out to lick at the wetness on John’s cheeks. Thoughtless, animal comfort.

John’s shoulders convulse with what he assumes is going to be another sob, and then he’s laughing, strangled and helpless. What else can he do? Alex stares at him, puzzled, and then far too late flinches back and claps his hands over his mouth.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, muffled through his palms. “Sorry, I just—I didn’t mean to, I wasn’t thinking—that was gross, right? It was gross. I’m gross. I’m disgusting.”

“No, no, no. Come here. You’re fine. It’s okay.” John pulls Alex’s face back down against his own. A breath of hesitation, and then he closes the distance between them to press his lips to the wet fur on Alex’s face. It’s weird, but only for a second. There’s the same warmth as when he’d kissed bare skin last night, a thousand years ago. Same smell of Alex’s coconut body wash. He’s not beyond recognition, not yet.

“D-don’t,” Alex groans, but there’s no force behind it.

“D’you want me to stop?”

“Nnn—ahh, fuck, _fuck_.”

Alex flops gracelessly off of John to sit up on his haunches. He makes a few abortive twists around, trying to get at the back of his sweats, but his elbows have settled in against his ribcage just enough to make that very difficult from his current position.

“Sorry, fuck, this stupid _thing_ , it—I don’t even know what it did. Ow.”

“Can I—here. Let me.”

Alex’s mouth twists, but he sits still and lets John check the tail. It’s already grown about half an inch just in the handful of minutes since he looked at it last, although it’s still rather patchy-furred. John tucks Alex’s sweats up on his skinny hips, glances at Alex’s face. Alex blinks back at him, resignation in his unfamiliar features.

“All right. First things first,” John says. He sniffs, scrubs at his face. “First thing, we’re gonna cut a hole in your sweats for, um. For that.”

Alex winces. “My clothes, John.”

“It doesn’t have to be those sweats. You can grab whichever ones are grungiest and you care least about, and we can cut those up. Just, the waistband sits right on top of, of it, and that can’t be comfortable.”

“Yeah. Fine.” Shuddery breath. ”It’s not. Comfortable, I mean. That would help, I think.”

“Good.”

“Only you might have to do it.” Alex waves one misshapen hand at John, makes a little hiccuping sob-giggle. “I’m, I’m pretty sure I can’t use scissors anymore. Thumbs’re too short.”

“That’s okay. That’s fine.”

“That was first. What’s second?”

“Second is—I’m gonna order takeout. For dinner. Or lunch. Or whatever meal this is. We can get Mexican from that place by campus, I’m pretty sure they deliver. And if they don’t, I’ll, I don’t know. Bribe them until they bring us carne asada.”

Alex flashes a tiny bit of fang in a wry smile. “You won’t let the dog have Advil, but you’ll let it have greasy Mexican food?”

“Please. Don’t call yourself that.” That comes out a little bit shattered, and John has to take a few breaths before he can go on. “I’ll, I’ll vet the menu. Make sure we’re not ordering anything that’ll make you sick. But I don’t wanna think about cooking, and we should have something that at least tastes good after all this. So. La Reina it is, unless you’ve got objections.”

“Mm. No. No, I think I’d like that.” Alex shifts position, his legs sprawling out awkwardly. “And then?”

“And then…we’ll see what happens, I guess.”

“Yeah. I guess.” He’s not satisfied with that answer, but John refuses to hear any more talk of leaving him on the side of the road, so he reaches out and cradles Alex’s long face with one hand. Alex sighs and presses his cheek into John’s palm, his eyes slitting closed.

“We’ll think past tomorrow when we get there. For now, I just wanna be with you, while I can. I wanna make this last.” John leans forward to rest his forehead against the smooth slope of Alex’s, his nose just brushing the bridge of Alex’s muzzle. “I love you. So much.”

“Love you too,” Alex says. He hooks a clumsy paw-hand over John’s shoulder. Shapes are wrong, angles are wrong, but it’s still Alex on the inside. He’s still here now, John reminds himself fiercely. And anything could happen in the next two days. A miracle, even.

But he can’t help feeling, as he clings to Alex with all the love he can muster, that they’re running out of time.

**Author's Note:**

> title from ["The Audre Lorde Questionnaire to Oneself"](https://dialogist.org/v4i2-brianna-albers/) by Brianna Albers.
> 
> if you're wondering "wait, are you that same fucker who did weird werewolves that other time" yeah, i probably am, and no, i'm not sure why i'm still riding this train. but hello again.


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